March 17, 2018

Yesterday's firing of Clinton deep-state agent Andrew McCabe has triggered the expected unimaginative comparisons to Watergate, but it is in fact only the opening volley in a new offensive against Hillary's dead-ender operatives.

The first thing to understand is that Donald Trump is a master of strategic misdirection. His very persona is proof of this. He projects the air of a bored, blowhard playboy with a five-second attention span when in reality he possesses a keen intellect and incredible patience. He uses this perception of himself as an incapable impulsive loon to lull his enemies into complacency, making his surprise attacks that much more effective.

We have seen this repeatedly, from his systematic destruction of Jeb! to his come-from-behind victory over Hillary Clinton. He is now working in the same methodical way to unwind the deep state moles that have burrowed into the federal bureaucracy.

In that context, Andrew McCabe's retirement date is almost a non-factor. In the last few weeks a number of deep staters have decided suddenly give up the game and seek greener pastures. McCabe himself wanted to do so, and his decision to take terminal leave indicated that he knew the tide was turning against him and that his best hope was to run out the clock by appearing to be a noncombatant.

Unfortunately for him, other, long-term events caught up with him.

The whale in the living room is of course the inspector general investigation. This has been chugging away for more than a year and unlike the Mueller snipe hunt, it is a target-rich environment.

The firing statement said as much. McCabe's wife took a whopping $700,000 from Clinton loyalist Terry McAuliffe to run for a Virginia senate seat at the same time McCabe was supposed to be investigating her unauthorized email scheme. McCabe did not disclose this, which is in and of itself a firing offense.

While the IG investigation proceeded, the principal targets remained silent, much as a bird ceases chirping when a snake is near. The firing of McCabe is the signal that the report is about to come out and that the prosecutions for obstructing justice, lying to the FISA court and other crimes are about to begin.

The decision to fire McCabe is a welcome distraction to this, since the chattering classes will now bring up endless Saturday Night Massacre stories, which is supposed to make Trump look like the second coming of Richard Nixon.

Yet here again we see evidence of Trump's superior strategic skill. McCabe lied to his employer and yet he expects to collect full retirement. This is the man the Democrats want to defend?

The guy wasn't even working. He wasn't engaged in an ongoing investigation to ferret out corruption, he had already put in for retirement! His entire complaint is based on being unable to run out the clock and collect a lucrative pension.

It is hard to imagine a figure less likely to generate public sympathy. In fact, Andrew McCabe is pretty much the poster child of everything wrong with the unaccountable federal government bureaucrats.

These people seem think they can make corrupt deals, lie about them and when they get caught, they can just take an early retirement - all at the taxpayers' expense!

Go ahead, Democrats and Quisling Never Trumpers, dig in and die on that hill. I can't wait for Bill Kristol to talk about how his "conservative principles" dictate lavish taxpayer-funded retirements for corrupt bureaucrats. It's in the Constitution! It's what the Founding Fathers wanted!

While the Dems and their bondage slaves engage in yet another clown show, the investigative noose will continue to tighten.

If the worst thing that happens to McCabe is his firing, he should count himself lucky. I think he knows this, hence his desperate attempt to claim truth-teller status.

March 13, 2018

Yet another Trump appointee has now heard his catch phrase: You're fired!

This time it's Rex Tillerson, a Big Oil executive who - when he was appointed - was smeared as being in bed with Russia.

Oddly, the exact same people are now hailing Tillerson as the last bulward against Russia. Such is the funhouse mirror logic of the Never Trump lunatics.

Personnel is policy, and Trump's staff has had unusually high turnover. The usual suspects claim this shows that Trump is an unstable leader, erratic, the administration is in disarray, but it actually shows none of those things.

Before examining the Trump administration, it's worth taking a look at a "normal" one, say that of George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

Dubya drew his people from the heart of the GOP establishment. They were faultlessly bred, had resumes going back decades and were staggeringly incompetent. One of the hallmarks of Bush's management style was his unwillingness to fire anyone for anything, whether debacles in Iraq or a badly botched messaging response to Hurricane Katrina.

The Obama administration took at look at its predecessor's ineptitude and said "Hold my beer." People who literally drove campaign vans were rewarded with offices far beyond their capabilities.

As with Bush, no one was ever held responsible for anything. Whether selling guns to drug cartels, leaving military veterans to die on waiting lists or weaponizing the IRS, it was a rare situation for someone to actually get sacked.

Thus Trump's approach is a welcome departure from a system the treated civil servants as untouchable and unaccountable.

Trump's outsider status has also had a huge impact on his staffing. When he effortlessly destroyed Jeb Bush in the primaries, he earned the undying enmity of the entire GOP establishment. Their intemperate vitriol and decision to become Quisling Never Trumpers disqualified them from any kind of appointment. Trump would therefore have to take chances on unproven individuals, many of whom demonstrated that their campaigning skills did not translate into governance.

Again, this is true for most administrations. The difference is that unlike his predecessors, Trump is unwilling to suffer fools gladly.

Finally, there is the fact that Trump owes almost no political favors. Barack Obama had to appoint Hillary Clinton to high office or risk a deep rupture in his party. The Bush family likewise to had buy off enemies while satisfying the greed of their long-serving vassals.

Trump is entirely outside the usual patronage system, which gives him unprecedented freedom of action to replace subordinates he finds wanting. In the case of Tillerson, the two men disagreed on several key issues. Tillerson also failed to rein in the State Department, allowing Obama partisans to openly defy the chief executive's priorities.

It is telling that Trump already had successors lined up, which is the exact opposite of what an impulsive or erratic person would do.

In that sense, the scandal surrounding Trump's high turnover is that it is so unusual. For decades people got promoted no matter how badly they screwed things up.

March 11, 2018

I believe it was almost exactly nine years ago that Rush Limbaugh caught grief for saying that he hoped Barack Obama failed in his goals.

He was broadly denounced as anti-American by progressives (which is always funny since they despise their country most of the time), but Limbaugh was on solid ground.

Obama's stated goals would cripple the country. His actual policies did cripple it.

A few months ago I pointed out that Obama managed to drive the economy into an eight-year recession. The growth he claimed was paid for by doubling the national debt. The stock market rose only because the Federal Reserve was juicing it up.

(Speaking of which, maybe those corrections were the Fed unwinding its stake? Food for thought.)

The Quisling Never Trumpers claim to be in the same position as Limbaugh in opposing Donald Trump's policies. They argue that their stand is a principled one, based on what's good for America.

The problem with this argument is that their own words directly contradict it.

Jen Rubin, for example, has reversed herself on every single policy she held simply to oppose Trump. Bret Stephens has done the same.

It is one thing to rethink a long-held belief. This often requires years of thoughtful reflection as well as considerable debate. The Never Trump traitors haven't done that. They simply flip-flopped as soon as Trump acted.

In the process, they have also revealed that they don't really care about America's success. Their own emotional state and social status is what it truly important to them.

For example, they warn that raising tariffs will cause a trade war and a global recession. This is nonsense on stilts. "Free trade" has crippled the middle class, destroyed the working class and made us increasingly dependent on global rivals for strategic materials.

Throughout history nations have protected key industries from foreign competition without causing commercial havoc. It was only in the last three decades that "free trade" became an article of faith for the neocons and their progressive allies.

Similarly, restricting immigration used to be a core conservative principle. Open borders is a radical departure from American policy and without precedent in human history. No nation, no state or realm ever threw open its doors to anyone who wanted to come in - and then blessed them with full citizenship. It's a recipe for national suicide.

Yet now the Benedict Arnold Right loves it and denounces actual border enforcement as racist.

The theme running through all their policies is fear and hatred. Fear of losing status and hatred of the working classes that elected a blowhard from Queens to the White House.

Yet that blowhard is more competent than any of his Ivy League predecessors. The economy is booming with more gains on the way. American military might is being slowly restored. Our enemies are alarmed and our people are more optimistic than they have been in 20 years.

This gets us to the real reason why the Never Trumpers are so angry: America might actually become stronger.

And it will have happened without them.

Consider last week's opening with North Korea. If this pans out, it would be a game-changer, a milestone is improving global security. The US has made a single concession: long-overdue face-to-face talks with North Korea.

In return the Norks have pledged to cease nuclear tests and missile launches and claims they will allow military exercises with South Korea to proceed without incident.

The US holds all the cards in this deal. If the Norks violate their pledges, they lose and the US military will resume its Doomsday Countdown on Little Rocket Man. But if they do hold true, it will be the first time they ever kept their word. That's pretty significant.

And yet the Never Trumpers are up in arms, supposedly because (it's hard not to laugh as I type this) it's an affront to democracy for a US president to sit down with a tin-pot dictator.

Yeah, I know. Where do they get this stuff?

The real fear, though, is that Trump might actually solve the problem, just as they fear his tariff will work and his border enforcement will work.

That is their ultimate nightmare, their greatest fear: that Orange Julius, whom they claim is ignorant, has a ten-second attention span, a witless baboon descending an escalator, that this guy will have exposed them as clueless idiots whose policies produced nothing but disaster.

It's one thing to be proven wrong, but it's another to be proven wrong by...Donald Trump!

That is why they are screaming their damn fool heads off over everything he does.

March 10, 2018

What is interesting to me about the lastest move in the North Korean standoff is how much the US gained for so little.

North Korea gains direct bilateral talks for the first time - a matter of some importance to them.

The US (and the world) in turn gains a moratorium on launches, bomb tests and a pledge not to interfere with US/South Korean military exercises.

More importantly, no US sanctions are being lifted. There are no pallets of cash headed to Pyongyang.

This is a very different dynamic from past negotiations, which required "humanitarian assistance" as a price for even beginning the otherwise useless talks.

Nothing may come of the dialog, but it certainly dispels the notion that his unconventional approach to diplomacy has done more harm than good.

Of course, on cue the Quisling Never Trumpers have been howling that merely meeting with Little Rocket Man is a disaster of the first order and a huge concession. As usual, they're full of shit. Logic dictates that when the same approach has been tried multiple times without failure, you change your approach.

Yet the only tactic in the Never Trumper playbook seems to be: fail harder.

People puzzling about how generals during World War I could continue to make bloody and fruitless frontal assaults despite hideous losses need look no further than these supposed military experts and strategic thinkers who have botched every job they've been given but still claim the mantle of authority and expertise.

The Trump Whitehouse contains some deep thinkers and it is perhaps no accident that despite superficial drama among civilian advisors, the core team of retired generals remains intact.

This, by the way, may also explain the full and unconditional pardon given to former Navy Sailor Kristian Saucier for a minor breach of security protocols relating to his nuclear submarine.

Saucier's transgressions were insignificant when compared to the massive security breach cause by Hillary Clinton - a crime made even more glaring by the FBI's decision not to even conduct a damage assessment.

The message was blatantly obvious: Laws are for the little people.

This environment is toxic to both morale and military discipline since it teaches senior commanders that the core value for advancement is butt-kissing rather than competence. If anyone wonders how it can be that two US warships had crews incapable of conducting basic navigation, this is your answer.

Far from being erratic or ill-tempered, Donald Trump is systematically rebuilding American might. His armed forces are becoming more advanced, better trained and morale is rapidly recovering from years of abuse at the hands of Obama appointees. This pardon is a clear signal to the enlisted ranks: The commander-in-chief has your back.

On the economic front, Trump has taken decisive action to protect key strategic materials and for the first time in years, labor force participation rates are increasing. Job creation is exploding and the new fear is that the economy may be expanding too fast. It's a wonderful problem to have.

The Korean gambit may fail, but what sets it apart from previous efforts is the explicit threat of force that has never been employed before. Unlike previous administrations, Trump has made it clear that he will denuclearize North Korea one way or the other. The only alternative to military action will be a nuclear arms race including Japan and South Korea, which would be a strategic disaster for North Korean's patron China.

This is perhaps why the offer has been made and why the talks may bear fruit. China is in a position to guarantee North Korean independence. A formal treaty ending the war coupled with a Chinese security pact would provide better security and stability than anything Pyongyang can produce on its own.

It is therefore in China's interest that North Korea make a deal. This too is a new development.

March 05, 2018

I'm old enough to remember when the Democrats actually pretended to care about blue collar jobs. Maybe it was a ruse back then, but they faked it well.

These days the Dems hold the working man in absolute contempt. Steelworkers, coal miners, skilled trades, heavy construction - all of these are icky jobs that need to go away. The progressive American Dream is a society consisting of tech firms, trendy non-profits who get their lawns mowed by indentured servants imported from exotic locales.

But these new feudal overlords will still drink "fair trade" lattes, so it's all good!

Back in the real world, "free trade" has been a disaster for the working classes and that damage has now spread both up and down. Trump's proposed tariffs are about protecting vital strategic industries and limiting further damage both to our economy and our social fabric.

The bizarre argument that domestic steel will make cars more expensive can only be made by ignoring the effects of not using domestic steel - higher unemployment, more drug use, more societal breakdown.

After all, who is supposed to buy these cars when all the workers are outsourced?

More tellingly, how is the United States supposed to defend its interests when it has to buy the steel for its weapons from its global challengers?

The argument for free trade was originally made in a world where the standard of living even in prosperous nations was abject poverty. The idea was that the dirt-stained wretches working in the fields should plant what grew best and trade for variety with other nations. There is a lot of merit to this.

But even back then it was understood that free laborers could not compete with slaves. Yet that is exactly where we are today, with first-world workers being asked to yield their jobs to convict labor in China and other shithole (to coin a phrase) countries.

It is hard for me to understand how the hard-fought gains of labor - which includes safety, working conditions, workman's comp as well as wages - can be completely abandoned in the space of a generation by the political party that once claimed to champion them.

Does anyone feel that there is a net gain to sending ships to India or Bangladesh to be broken up by destitute workers with no safety gear while American yards remain idle?

(This by the way exposes the lie at the heart of western environmentalism: they don't care about the earth as a whole, they just want their neighborhood to be nice and tidy. They are quite happy to outsource pollution so long as they keep their own hands clean.)

Donald Trump won election in large part by giving voice to those who had been left behind by the political establishment. When Barack Obama derided Trump's determination to revive domestic manufacturing as "waving a magic wand," he not only exposed his own ignorance but also demonstrated his contempt for the working classes.

There is nothing inevitable about globalization. It is a policy favored by transnational mega-corporations to maximize profit at the expense of the workers and the societies they support.

Global trade has existed for centuries, but it was only recently that elites decided to sell out their native populations to make a quick buck.

I've noted this before but it bears repeating: Trump is proving himself to be a true conservative on this issue, hearkening back to the original platform of the Republican Party. The Quisling NeverTrump lunatics screaming that free trade is a core conservative principle are - as usual - lying through their caviar-stained teeth.

Like all things Trump, the real question is what he does rather than what he says. As with DACA and gun control (and a host of other things) Trump's statements are often just trial balloons, an opening offer designed to draw out potential opponents. The key with Trump is to see what he does rather than what he says.

In the interim, however, Trump has once again forced his opponents to expose themselves as implacably hostile to blue-collar workers, who will no doubt take note and act accordingly.

February 27, 2018

The title of this post is only a little tongue in cheek. The fact remains that while the FBI was studiously ignoring please from concerned citizens to stop a known lunatic from shooting up his school, they were continuing to focus on a much greater threat to the United States:

NCAA basketball.

Thanks to the tireless work of our diligent law enforcement experts, the NCAA was able to determine that Louisville was - get this - an NBA factory that paid to get its players. The FBI provided the crucial missing evidence to get Louisville's 2013 banner taken away and the scandal also cost corner-cutting coach Rick Pitino his job.

All that for only 17 dead teenagers! Quite the bargain.

Do I exaggerate?

I don't think so. Investigative resources are finite. The task of the leadership is therefore to prioritize among the competing claims for those resources.

For some strange reason, the FBI decided that the cozy relationship between athletic apparel makers, NBA talent scouts and big-time coaches comprised a criminal conspiracy to deprive the American people of good brackets come March.

One of those Americans was then-president Barack Obama. He wasn't much interested in things like fleet readiness or the Chinese hacking into the Office of Personnel Management's files, but he was obsessed with March Madness. Did one of the coaches under investigation break his brackets?

If we know one thing about Barack Obama it is that his pettiness knows no bounds. We also know that FBI Director Jim Comey would do whatever was asked of him to curry favor with his boss. The Secretary of State is auctioning off uranium for Russian donations to her foundation? No problem.

I'm sure one might argue that some of the bigger basketball payments ran afoul of tax law, but that's where the IRS is supposed to come in.

Of course they were too busy harassing conservatives and stonewalling the resulting investigation, so they simply had no people to spare.

To put it another way - if he was willing to break the law to send the IRS to attack his opponents, why wouldn't he use the FBI to target teams he didn't like?

And if the price was a few more dead bodies, why that would just make the case for gun control, wouldn't it? I mean, it's not like his Justice Dept. covered selling guns to Mexican drug cartels, right?

It renders otherwise safe weapons uncontrollable, presenting a danger to shooters and those near them.

Of course the gun control fanatics will stop at nothing to achieve their irrational and counter-productive goal of a disarmed populace. They're using their usual blend of lies and emotional blackmail to advance their unholy cause.

They should, however, be careful in this. It is an open secret in the gun community that violations of federal purchase laws are rarely prosecuted. Were the Justice Dept. to order a major crackdown on this and highlight jurisdictions where local law enforcement isn't doing its share, a number of Democrat-ruled jurisdictions will be shown to be actively looking the other way regarding firearms laws.

As with the bump stock issue, Trump can also (quite properly) highlight how it was the Obama administration that chose to ignore these lawbreakers, putting countless innocent citizens at risk.

A new inquiry into Fast and Furious might also prove embarrassing for Obama's rapidly tarnishing legacy.

All of this information is already known to those who follow the issue closely. It is not known by the larger public.

The president can swiftly change this, and in the process turn the Dems' own words against them.

Oh, and he might also talk about how strict gun control is useless without some kind of border protection.

Like a wall or something - which of course the Dems will staunchly refuse to fund.

Donald Trump has a knack for making his opponents destroy themselves. This could get very interesting.

Before getting into quotes, I will first provide some original content.

My generation is probably the youngest one that can still remember what used to be called "decency." There were things that people simply didn't say.

My grandparents didn't smoke, drink or swear - limitations that seem quaint today but were still common in my youth. A political candidate who had an extra-marital affair was immediately disqualified from holding office, which is why those that did took great pains to keep it secret.

No one wrote these rules out, it was just understood that certain things were off limits.

In my youth, those limits were under assault by smarty-pants liberals who liked to poke fun at them. There's nothing inherently wrong with that of course - people have made fun on societal conventions since they had societal conventions, but the difference was that this was all mean-spirited humor. Liberals viewed the conventions as stupid and wrong, and wanted sweep them away.

As this process unfolded, the defenders of the old values tried to resist, but they were hampered by their adherence to those values. To refer back to a personal example, my grandparents believed it was deeply wrong to insult people. Because of this, they put themselves at a disadvantage against those for whom insult and ridicule were the the go-to weapons.

This was a major factor in the degeneration of their church, the United Methodists. Despite the howlings of the progressives, the old-timers didn't hate gay people, and they recoiled from repeated insult and abuse. Their opponents exploited this advantage and so the Methodists effectively purged the people who were once the pillars of their faith.

The same dynamic was in play in the broader society. Gangsta rap, increasingly pornographic-style sex scenes in movies, ultra-violence being glorified for its own sake, and the common theme that conventional values were worthless hypocrisy made a remorseless advance across the cultural landscape.

In 1988, Gary Hart's political career was destroyed by the revelation of an affair. By 1992, Bill Clinton was able to survive the scandal by saying it was in the past. By 1998, he was able to survive an affair consummated in the Oval Office by arguing that personal character no longer mattered.

This progression was essentially how we got President Trump.

After decades of losing and watching their values get trashed, the cultural conservatives came to understand that adhering to the rules of decency was a sucker's game. We learned that our grandparents tactics were self-defeating.

To be clear, most conservative people never changed their views on appropriate tactics. The change came because the old generation passed away and the new generation grew up with the rules as they saw them.

A Christian conservative born in 1925 would never in a million years have voted for Trump, but one born in 1980 can do so with glee.

As Klavan puts it:

The left wants us to reel in shock that Donald Trump chased women or praised Russian strong men? Who was it who defended the infidelities and possible rapes of Bill Clinton? Who was it who turned a blind eye to Barack Obama consorting with terrorists and hate-mongers like Farrakhan?

That last passage reminds me of the time the Obama White House hosted a rapper whose album featured a dead judge. The future Quisling Never Trumpers clicked their tongues, but the rest of us took note that this was now the new normal. Obama had just formally endorsed making fun of dead judges.

I mention this specific example because one can't help but notice how much of the progressive agenda and The Resistance is being advanced by judicial overreach. Should (God forbid) an activist judge get the same treatment meted out to the GOP Congress at baseball practice, I'm sure that album photo will get prominent placement in right-wing media and that the left will completely ignore it.

I was interested to see that my co-blogger's post got linked by Fark and - as one would expect - the two comments they left consisted of a personal insult and a pathetic straw man. Such is the intellectual rigor of our opponents. (Our resident troll - as usual - offered a link rather than coming up with an original argument on his own.)

Turning back to Klavan's quote, the long-suppressed photo of Barack Obama grinning with Louis Farrakhan carries particular import in our tempestuous times. Within hours of the school shooting (which the FBI could have stopped, but didn't), the mainstream press was speculating that a white nationalist did the dirty need. Law enforcement subsequently said there's no evidence of this, but progressives got their smear out there, so mission accomplished.

The problem for them is that the cry of "racism" has lost its power and again, this is not because conservatives became suddenly bigoted but because the left has been showing their own bigotry non-stop for the last decade.

The younger generation has come of age steeped in anti-white rhetoric and at the same time knows that black nationalism is treated as a positive good. Another cultural more has been destroyed.

Great job, progressives.

I miss the old culture - the campy conventions where people used euphemisms and clever insults rather than dropping f-bombs all over the place. The movies were better, the music was better and society was better.

Back then, people of goodwill across the political spectrum were working towards racial reconciliation. Don't tell me the 80s were a nightmare of segregation and bigotry when the three most popular people were Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby.

Despite a more diverse population, race relations are now the worst I've ever seen, and that's because the left made it okay to hate. They thought that exception only applied to them, but the common culture cuts both ways.

Schlichter is right - liberals are going to hate the world they created.

February 17, 2018

One way of examining an event is to explore a counterfactual case - that is to say, looking at what didn't happen.

In an alternate reality, there would be a minor local news item about a mentally ill Florida man who made terrorist threats on the internet, was reported to the FBI who in turn notified local law enforcement. The guy was a known troublemaker and with this additional input, they finally obtained a warrant from a judge to have him taken into custody.

If that had happened, the pain in our fallen world would be a little less.

But it didn't happen, and the reason it didn't happen is that the FBI didn't take any action. Local law enforcement's attitude seemed to be an exasperated shrug and the politicians have zero interest in mental health law reform because it is a complex issue and it is hard for them to strike morally preening poses while vilifying their enemies.

Plus, it offers insufficient opportunities for graft.

We have the most incompetent political class in my lifetime and the repeated failure of lawmakers to do anything about the problem of "known wolves" is a key indicator of that incompetence.

Another is the failure of law enforcement itself. The FBI has revealed itself to be a completely corrupt organization. Its culture is one where solving crime takes a back seat to political intrigue. The RUSSIA fiasco is only the latest and most revealing example of their decadence and ineptitude, but there are countless examples of them dropping the ball, from the Boston Marathon bombing to serving as Whitey Bulger's muscle.

There is also the Fast and Furious scandal, which produced zero criminal action despite thousands of weapons being illegally sold to known criminals. I wish to underline this particular point: not only were no criminals rounded up as a result of the sales, no officials were held responsible when people were killed with the illegally sold weapons. It is a culture of total impunity.

Similarly, the FBI was well aware of the terrorist attack on Pam Gellar's Mohammed cartoon show and arguably had a part in provoking it, but once again they did nothing to stop it, not even warning local law enforcement to be vigilant.

They clearly don't care if people get killed.

The lesson from all of this is that passing more laws will do nothing because not only won't they be enforced, no one will be punished for not enforcing them. We will have a situation where everything is technically illegal but only the politically vulnerable are targeted. This is why Black Lives Matter above all things should be vehemently against gun control.

If you believe there is a racist culture in law enforcement, why would you want the police to have even more power? Does anyone seriously think that the first wave of house-to-house searches for guns will take place in Upper East Side Manhattan, Beverly Hills or Palm Springs? I think you'll see them in Chicago, Detroit and other minority-majority areas - the same places where carnage is commonplace and the media is completely silent about it.

Giving the state even more power when it can't manage to effectively use the power it has is madness. I suppose it's emotionally satisfying to say "DO SOMETHING!!!" but the thing that needs to be done is logically review where the gaps in our mental health laws are as well as demanding full accountability from law enforcement as to why they routinely refuse to act on information about a fully preventable crime.

That's hard, which is why progressives would rather preen and call people they don't like names.

The former first lady is unrecognizable as herself, and the main object of the painting seems to be her billowing and complex dress. I actually took an art history course in college, and the blue background is part of the "half-assed" movement that emerged during the latter half of the 20th Century.

The ex-president's portrait is even odder, with the president seemingly vanishing (or emerging from) a layer of ivy. There is no perspective on the background - his feet and the legs of the chair just end in mid-air, perhaps symbolizing the ethereal nature of his presidency.

Adding further nuance is the fact that the chair and president are lit from the front, but there are no shadows on the greenery behind him. This also is a trait of the "half-assed" school, since (as the savants at 4chan have documented), the background appears to be the result of a copy-and-paste job.

If one takes the time to go through previous presidential portraits, there are two clear trends. The first is the impact of photography, which displaced traditional portraiture as a medium of record. Once it was clear that an absolute likeness could be produced by technological means, traditional painting seemed anachronistic.

This led to the second trend, and that is Democrats opting to go for oddball approaches for their official portraits. FDR's is the first example, with his hands seeming more important than the man himself. Truman bucked the trend, but then JFK went all-in on the new goofiness. LBJ and Jimmy Carter went the conventional route, but Bill Clinton followed his idol's footsteps and when with a caricature rather than an actual likeness.

And now we have the Obamas.

The left didn't used to be so monolithic in terms of political correctness. Oh, they were political, but a substantial portion of the arts establishment could set aside politics where aesthetics were concerned.

Those days are long over. For progressives, to know a Republican is to shun him. The quality of their art is secondary to their political identification.

The drive for purity also has tainted the art itself, so that the full spectrum of the human experience is no longer something to be explored. Now all works must be tested for political correctness and only those found sufficiently virtuous can be allowed to flourish.

Legions of would-be censors scour the internet for thought crimes and instantly pounce on "problematic" items.

What you get is what we see here: boring garbage. I wager that your average sidewalk painter at an art fair should could produce superior work.

In a related vein, it appears the new comic book movie ("Black Panther" I believe) is now the most perfect film ever released. Anyone who disparages it faces public abuse and threats of harm.

I don't watch comic book movies any more, but I suspect that this one is just as awful as the rest, but for some reason it is now an Important Symbol of the Movement.

Partly this is because this film is the first move ever to feature a black superhero. Apparently Blade, Men in Black and Hancock (to name but a few) don't count.

I'm really getting tired of this current generation pretending that they are pioneers blazing trails in equality when in fact they're driving down an interstate built by their grandparents' blood and sweat.

The worst part of this is that it drives actual pioneers down the memory hole. Hatty McDaniels is all but forgotten, partly because her outstanding performance is in a movie that is now deemed "problematic."